A Smarter Way To Deal With Global Warming

This weekend
Barron's ran
a Q&A with Bjorn Lomborg, an expert on global warming who
expresses a clear eyed view of the problems with the planet's
rising temperature and the smartest ways to deal with it.

Lomborg believes that the planet is warming and CO2 contributes,
but he doesn't see it as an unmanageable catastrophe. For
example, citing U.N. research, he says sea levels will only rise
by 6 inches to 2 feet by 2100. Compare that to the fact that sea
levels rose by 1 foot in the past 150 years. We've managed pretty
well as a species in the past century, so, rising sea levels are
" a problem we can deal with."

Barron's: Bjorn, what do you think will be
the outcome of the negotiations to curb global warming this
December?

Lomborg: The participating nations will again
agree to spend quite a bit of money to cut carbon emissions and
again achieve virtually nothing. We already tried that twice --
in Rio in 1992, and in Kyoto in 1997. Both of these treaties
failed. We will see a lot of posturing, but presumably this isn't
about having a lot of environmental ministries or even presidents
and prime ministers come out and claim credit for making costly
commitments that we won't be able to live up to, and which would
barely make a dent in the problem anyway. When I first started in
the global-warming debate, I was struck by the fact that the
world was going to pay $180 billion a year for a protocol that
could at best reduce the temperature by 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit by
the end of the 21st century. The U.N. estimates that for less
than half that amount, we could provide clean drinking water,
sanitation, and basic health care and education to every single
human being on the planet. The same warped sense of priorities
will continue to bedevil us this December in Copenhagen.

...What would you do to curb the demand for carbon-emitting
fossil fuels?

Global warming is definitely a problem, and we should definitely
do something. But we shouldn't do just anything -- we should do
the smart thing. The main difficulty with global warming is that
fossil fuels are not only fairly cheap, they also make this world
so rich and so good to live in by providing us with all the
amenities that we see around us: light, heat, the ability to
propel ourselves to many different places. So we aren't going to
give up fossil fuels without having a great alternative. Right
now there is no good alternative to fossil fuels. And so the
Chinese and the Indians and everybody else -- but also the
Americans and the Europeans -- will keep on burning a lot of
fossil fuels.

Everybody seems to be saying, let's make carbon-emitting fossil
fuels so expensive, nobody will want to use them. But that is
bound to fail. So rather than making fossil fuels so expensive,
we should try to make green energy so cheap that everybody will
want to use it. That means investing in research and development
to get better technologies available for 2020, but especially for
2040 and afterward. Investing in making solar panels so cheap
that even China and India will want to buy them.